Friday, September 26, 2008

Detective of Mozilla: DOM inspector

Though it is not a detective but a Document Object Model inspector. Means it inspects the DOM of the web application or the XUL Application.

I was looking for the function called by the close button of Thunderbird. I was not able to find it properly and efficiently. At the same time I was chatting on irc and came to know about DOM inspector add-on for Mozilla. I installed the add-on for Firefox and Thunderbird and I found it extremely handy.

Let me explain how to use it for finding the function for the buttons or the commands. I am going to explain it for Firefox and if somebody wanted to use it for Thunderbird they can contact me.Steps:

Download and install the DOM inspector add-on from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1806.

Then open DOM window from Tool -->DOM Inspector.

A new window will pop-up. Choose appropriate option in File--> "Inspect Chrome Document."

There are so many features but the main we are looking for is to "find a node by clicking on it". To use that feature click on the icon highlighted below.

After that click on the option for which you want to know the commands.

Here is the image when I clicked on the File menu on Menu bar.

There are IDs and CLASSs are written beside the object. That data can be researched on http://mxr.mozilla.org/ and the proper function can be found.

This tool might speed up the process.

Through this tool I found the function for closing button in Firefox. It is on